Isa Jamira
Isa Jamira is being recognized for her emerging work focused on uplifting farmers' narratives, particularly her recent work in partnership with Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, on the farm bill. Isa Jamira is a garden educator from Mount Vernon, New York. She started urban gardening and farming in 2017 as an environmental studies college intern at Bates College. As a full time student, she taught her peers about gardening and assisted harvesting nearly two thousand pounds of produce for the dining hall. As an artist, activist, and farmer, Isa creates educational experiences around food and land. Through hosting and facilitating social events, she creates welcoming spaces for people to have fun, learn, and collectively set intentions for a safe and just future. Her work encourages and teaches people to foster a relationship with our Earth by growing food. In 2022, Isa founded Liberated Lands Inc., and acquired an acre of land to grow the first Liberated Lands campus with the mission to create healing and educational growing environments for free thinkers.
Margarita Fernandez
Margarita Fernandez is being recognized for her documentary, Our Agroecology, Our Future, exploring the successes and challenges of the Cuban agri-food system through the voices of farmers. For more than 25 years, Margarita has been researching, practicing, promoting and defending agroecology, food sovereignty, farmers rights, sustainable livelihoods and biodiversity conservation thru transdisciplinary and participatory action research (PAR), coordination of global dialogues and processes, and the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of international cooperation projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the USA. Since 2015 she directs the nonprofit, Caribbean Agroecology Institute, which facilitates knowledge and farmer exchanges, supports PAR processes, resources local communities and shift narratives by amplifying voices of those advancing transformative agroecology in Cuba and the Caribbean. Margarita has over a dozen articles published in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and grey literature. Our Agroecology, Our Future is her first documentary.